Cables can be buried in trenches in the ocean bottom. There are cable plows for this. [1] They're huge and slow. Undersea power cables are routinely buried, but comm cables are only buried near shore.
The downside of cable burial is that repair is harder.
It’s impossible to protect these cables so the only thing you can do is build in massive redundancy. Strategically it is probably cheaper to lay down many dozens of these cables in different locations than expect to protect them
I remember reading that the early telegram adopters were really surprised that no one destroyed the lines just for fun. They all thought it was a doomed technology cause the masses would sabotage it. TBH we’ve been pretty lucky for the last 2 centuries.
NATO is currently investigating future internet backup routes through satellites in the case of undersea cable failures. But that technology is only in a preliminary, proof-of-concept stage and may be many years from real-world relevance.
We already have satellite links and can configure our networks to route through them when a primary route disappears. Why are they saying this is "future tech"?
Are they talking about backups at a bulk backbone level for which we simply don't have enough satellite capacity?
Animats ·18 days ago
The downside of cable burial is that repair is harder.
[1] https://www.smd.co.uk/category/trenching/
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blindriver ·18 days ago
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kouru225 ·18 days ago
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rkagerer ·18 days ago
NATO is currently investigating future internet backup routes through satellites in the case of undersea cable failures. But that technology is only in a preliminary, proof-of-concept stage and may be many years from real-world relevance.
We already have satellite links and can configure our networks to route through them when a primary route disappears. Why are they saying this is "future tech"?
Are they talking about backups at a bulk backbone level for which we simply don't have enough satellite capacity?
Show replies
nuker ·18 days ago
https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...